Ellie's Thoughts by Bicycle

We Found a Piano!

So I was riding my bike home today when I encountered an abandoned piano on the streets of San Francisco near Alamo Square Park. I’m always finding items gifted to the streets of San Francisco–books, picture frames, chairs, even couches– but this abandoned piano is the best find yet!

We still don’t know who it used to belong to.

As per my comrades in this adventure, Kyle and Carla: I had never before met Kyle before this moment, but he stopped to listen as I played a few tunes and to ask me why on earth this piano was sitting on rollers in the street. I had no good answer, but since he just started playing piano three weeks ago, we realized it would be a kick in fate’s face for him to NOT adopt this lovely contraption. So thus began our journey to roll it into his garage!

That’s around the moment that Carla joined us–she’s the one recording the video (until my phone quickly ran out of storage space). Carla, I had met twice before, and that’s a fun story in itself. It took us a few minutes to realize where we recognized each other from, but it turns out I had first encountered her four-man/woman band back in November when they played on the streets of the Mission in front of 826 Valencia on a Thursday night. I took their business card and a video that night, but lost both and had no way of tracking them down. Five months later, though, I was carrying my ukulele in a coffee shop when a woman approached me asking if I also played the mandolin or banjo because her band was looking for new instrumentalists. Turns out it was her! Here and now, about a month after the second encounter, she stumbled upon new-friend-Kyle and I as we played tunes and debated ways to lift this abandoned piano to his third-floor apartment down the block.

I love the power of music 🙂

This reminds me of this beautiful video from the Disposable Film Festival, except our version of the story ended more happily. I guess if you leave something on the streets on NYC for more than 24 hours, that’s what has to happen.